the clichéd, awkward first post

People keep telling me to write more. In school, it was my teachers, guidance counselors, and my mother. Now, it's friends and former teachers... and my mother. So, I'm finally going to take one little piece of the sound advice I've been ignoring for the last ten years, and try to do something with it. No promises.

Lately, I've been encouraged to write about my experiences in the military. Everybody does that, though. There are thousands of grouchy soldiers blogging away all over the world. Hopefully there's room for one more. 

I'm not always grouchy though. And I don't want to focus on the military. The military is usually pretty boring. Seriously. Someday, I'll post a little entry about the sweeping, mopping, and scrubbing that occur at 8:45AM, Monday through Friday, in a barracks built during the Korean Conflict, that I don't even live in. It'll bore you to tears. There are so many other things I want to write about. Apparently, I'm that guy that finds himself in some pretty odd situations. 

However, there will be one little quip on here, twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, that I take from my experience in the armed forces: the title. During my first tour in Iraq I found black tinted sunglasses to be too dark. At the same time, clear glasses make me look like a weirdo. So I switched to an amber tint, and haven't looked back. 

Actually, that's a lie. I look back pretty frequently. Like when I'm backing out of my parking spot.  So, my goal for this blog is to record how things looked through those amber lenses.